Kong 1.0 marks a significant milestone for the open-source microservice API gateway by introducing a host of new features that enhance its scalability, flexibility, and resilience, while ensuring backward compatibility. The release broadens its utility through service mesh support, allowing Kong to function as a standalone service-mesh proxy with integrated plugins for enhanced visibility and security, and introduces mutual TLS and TCP routing capabilities for improved traffic management across hybrid and cloud-native architectures. The update also includes primitive gRPC support, a new Database Abstraction Object for seamless migrations, and a Plugin Development Kit that ensures compatibility and ease of plugin development. Additionally, Kong 1.0 offers separate control and data plane configurations, allowing more secure and efficient large-scale deployments, and includes performance improvements for plugins and interactions with AWS Lambda and Azure FaaS. The release is a testament to the contributions of the Kong community and sets the stage for further development towards supporting emerging ecosystems and maintaining a robust platform for diverse deployment scenarios.